The popularity of the Internet, coupled with the increasing capabilities of personal/mobile electronic devices, has provided consumers with the ability to enjoy multimedia content almost anytime and anywhere. For example, live (e.g., sports events) and video on demand (VOD) content (e.g., television shows and movies) can be streamed via the Internet to personal electronic devices (e.g., computers, mobile phones, and Internet-enabled televisions).
Internet video publishers often publish webpages that include links (e.g., hyperlinks) to video streams. The publication cost of each video stream may depend on how many viewers access the video stream using the published link. To control publication costs, it may be beneficial to restrict the number of simultaneous and total viewers of a video stream. For example, if a paying subscriber shares a link to a video stream with a non-paying subscriber, it may be beneficial to prevent the non-paying subscriber from using the link to access the video stream, to reduce bandwidth costs.